JSTOR Redesign

September 7th, 2010 by Chris Strauber

JSTOR has made some significant changes to how it works, in addition to adding a new coat of paint to its design. Traditionally JSTOR has not covered the current issues of the journals it includes, with anywhere from 3-5 years of current issues usually excluded. It’s also traditionally been all full-text–anything you found in JSTOR you could read immediately. Over the last year JSTOR has been doing deals with scholarly publishers to include abstracts of current issues of some of its journals, about 174 so far, of the 1200 or so we subscribe to from JSTOR. (full list of titles).

This makes JSTOR more like a service along the lines of Academic Onefile, which includes lots of full text and some abstracts. What’s tricky is that JSTOR so far doesn’t support the technology behind our FindIt@Tufts feature, which points you in the direction of subscriptions elsewhere in our collections. We subscribe to most of what they’re indexing, and if you’re on campus and follow a link that looks like this you’ll likely have no trouble reading and downloading. From off-campus you may be asked to pay for access to an article–don’t do this before you check and see whether the library catalog has the journal title and date. You can also request things we don’t have through ILLiad , our interlibrary loan service, and get a PDF copy emailed to you, usually in two days or less.

JSTOR search options

If you want to search JSTOR the way you have in the past, uncheck the “include links to external content” box on the search screen.

If you want to search just the current material, uncheck the “include only content I can access” box. But note that this is a few years of less than two hundred of the 40,000 or so titles we subscribe to.

Confused? Just ask if you get stuck.

This entry was posted
on Tuesday, September 7th, 2010 at 2:11 pm and is filed under database tips, news.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.